Nintendo finally reveals the Switch console

Where’s the LIKE button when you need it???

Well played!

DFC Intelligence believes Nintendo will sell 40 million Switch units by the end of 2020.

[quote]
Today, the research firm issued its forecast for the Switch through 2020, which predicts that Nintendo will manage to shift 40 million units, which would represent almost three times as many units as the Wii U sold in its first four years. DFC acknowledges that initial hardware allocations and a slim launch lineup will limit the system in the beginning but “demand is expected to be strong and the major issue will be whether the system can attract a broad audience starting in the holiday sales season of 2017.”[/quote]

Sure, but it would be 10m less than 3DS sales in its first four years, and 20m less than the combined Wii-U and 3DS sales at the respective points in their lifecycles.

DFC predicted some astronomical figure for the WiiU, only to continually lower expectations after launch, with the last prediction being 25 million before they seemed to just give up trying to gauge the console at all. Last I heard they assumed it would move about as many units as the Gamecube (22 million), but I think WiiU ended up moving only 2/3rds of that over all, at 13~14 million or something.

Not sure how to take DFC’s 40 million prediction for Switch.

The way any other form of foul witchcraft and fortune telling should be taken - with pitchforks and torches, down to a lake. :)

They’re important industry analysts, obviously they know more than you or me.

/s

Out of curiosity does anyone remember the Wii launch price?

$250, I believe.

Say what you want about Nintendo’s “gimmicks”, but they often end up being standard control schemes later. You could have said, “I wish they’d make the console cheaper instead of adding all these gimmicks like an analog stick, rumble pak, shoulder buttons…” and on and on. There’s nothing that says that the current PS4 controller layout is the One True Controller forever and ever amen.

Huh? Where’s motion control of the Wii then? Where’s all the controllers that look anything like the goofy ass N64 or GameCube controllers. The answer is nowhere. That is pure Nintendo fantasy. When will people stop making Nintendo out as leaders of the games industry. That stopped 20 years ago.

The duel analog stick, dpad, facebuttons, shoulder button/trigger is the default and has been for going on two decades, and it wasn’t because of Nintendo.

I still think the Roku remote looks a lot like the Wii mote. It’s one of the most simple remotes I’ve ever seen, for streaming or games. And let’s not forget they completely dominate the handheld market, still. Your default controller has a lot of Nintendo in it, a lot.

Symmetrical face buttons are stupid, and the basic design of the GameCube controller (and Wii controllers) makes a lot of sense. Most games have one primary action and several secondary actions. Very few games use them all equally, and those games (e.g. fighting games) should be the exceptions that use non standard controllers.

The only real exception use case is using them as left handed d-pad alternates, but that is again, pretty rare.

I’m not, and have never, said that none of their new ideas work, but my opinion on them has not changed. It seems like Nintendo throws a dart blindfolded at a dart board full of ideas when picking what new thing to try. Sometimes it is a good idea, sometimes it is dumb. It is basically a perfect example of the group think that is slowly killing Nintendo. They need to hire someone who is able to say No when an idea is stupid.

I personally do not think most of the tech they are building in to their joypad things is going to be used more than a token amount in most of their games. Similar to motion on the wii, the gamepad screen on the wii u, 3d on the 3ds. Thus i think the system would do a lot better if it was more reasonably priced for what it is.

D-pad: started by Nintendo on the NES (and technically the Game & Watch before that)
Facebuttons: the current ABXY layout was started on the SNES
Shoulder buttons: started by Nintendo on the SNES
Trigger: the first trigger was from the N64 controller
Analog stick: the first analog stick was on the N64 controller

But yes, Sony came up with the first controller with dual analog sticks, Sony has the first controller with two sets of shoulder buttons, and the Xbox was the first controller with dual triggers.

You can say that Nintendo hasn’t innovated on the controller for two evades, but no one else really has either.

The gamepad screen on the Wii U is literally what the Switch is based on.

Don’t forget analog triggers first appearing on the GameCube.

Literally the only thing modern dual sticks didn’t take from Nintendo is the second stick and L3/R3 (by the way clicky sticks still annoy me to this day)

But keep on keeping on that Nintendo didn’t do much for the modern controller guys.

But they kind of died with the Gamecube controllers, didn’t they? Did anyone else ever have those weird triggers like that again?

I prefer the other kind of analog triggers that the original Xbox controller and Dreamcast controller had. The Xbox was a lot more comfortable than the Dreamcast ones though. The DC ones really gave me blisters pretty fast. And those are still around, seen on the 360 controller and now the PS4 controllers and X1 controllers.

It isn’t really the same thing.

The wii u gamepad did not provide much extra value to games while playing on the TV. It was basically a token add on to all of the games i played, moving UI elements that would have worked better on the TV to the gamepad just to use it. As a controller, the wii u gamepad was a failure.

Whether you think it allowed you to remotely play without using the TV to a decent quality of life is separate. I’d argue that the switch is just a mobile device with an HDMI out.

I think you’re grossly misunderstanding the argument. Nintendo trying to innovate is exactly the problem! They are no longer good at coming up with compelling new controller schemes, and end up gambling it all on impractical gimmicks.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with trying to innovate a bit. Sony and Microsoft also try to do it occasionally. They aren’t any better at it. For example with the DS4 Sony’s stupid gimmicks were the built in speaker, the light bar, and the touchpad. The first two hardly get used, the third basically gets used as a digital button rather than the sophisticated gesture-aware control surface it was intended to be. (And yes, the DS4 does have a gyroscope and an accelerometer; but again software doesn’t make any significant use of them. The motion features of that controller might as well not exist).

Out of the three most recent console launches, we’ve had two whose failure was at least partly based on controls. The Kinect made the XBox One absurdly expensive. That system was basically dead in the water until they finally took the Kinect behind the shed. The Wii U also remained grossly overpriced all the way to the end. The reason for that can only be the game pad, since all the other technology in it was ancient.

And now Nintendo are again launching a console that’s considered overpriced compared to the competition. Judging from the price of a pair of Joycons, a big part of their cost problem are the controllers. And to make the problem even worse there’s the screen. They’ve come up with a scheme where everyone has to pay the cost of the touch screen, but games can’t be built around any kind of significant touch screen functionality. It’s the worst of both worlds.